DALLAS AND TULIA: A TALE OF TWO CITIES

WAR NEWS Over 70 pending drug cases and convictions have been dismissed or
vacated in Dallas in the wake of a police scandal broken last month by The
Dallas Morning News and WFAA television. The prosecutions all involved
large undercover buys of cocaine or methamphetamine by the same team of
officers, using the same confidential informant. Belated testing of
evidence in one case revealed that the dope was phony, which led to more
widespread testing and the startling revelation that half of all the
cocaine seized by the Dallas Police Department last year was actually
powdered gypsum. You know it as Sheetrock, but the cops apparently didn't
know it from shit. Or did they? The informant, who earned about $200,000 in
fees for his services last year, told the News that he wasn't the one to
blame for the phony drugs, raising the possibility that the officers (two
of whom have been suspended pending the outcome of an FBI investigation)
were in on the bogus deals. Then, just when things were getting
interesting, Whoops! the talkative informant found himself deported. It
remains to be seen what effect that untimely development will have on the
investigation.

Several of the defendants have already been deported as well, so their
dismissals will come as little consolation. But at least the Dallas
District Attorney, Bill Hill, had the good sense to throw out the
prosecutions, rather than stick by the questionable evidence. In some
instances, Hill had no choice but to drop the cases, thanks to a new law
passed by the state legislature last session. In press reports,
spokespersons for police and prosecutors have cited a new evidence
corroboration law as one reason they went back and took a harder look at
the evidence in these cases. Sponsored by Juan Hinojosa (D-McAllen), the
new law was one of last session's Tulia bills, conceived by the Texas ACLU
and inspired by the Observer's reporting on the Panhandle drug scandal of
1999-2000, a disaster which has some remarkable parallels to the current
controversy. The new law prevents prosecutors from making cases based
solely on evidence provided by a confidential informant. Several of the
Dallas cases had no corroborating evidence (e.g. audio, video,
eyewitnesses, etc.), hence they had to be thrown out, regardless of whether
the dope was phony or not.

The Tulia cases were made by an undercover officer, not an informant, so
the bill would not have applied in those cases. (The ACLU originally sought
to have it apply to officers as well, and will likely come back to the lege
with that change next session.) But the real difference between the Tulia
and Dallas scandals has been the district attorneys involved. While Hill
sought to come clean as soon as he saw the writing on the wall, Tulia D.A.
Terry McEachern has stuck by his narc, Tom Coleman, despite the complete
lack of corroboration of his testimony, the highly suspicious nature of the
buys he made, and the seemingly endless cascade of unflattering revelations
about his personal and professional past. To date there have been no
reversed convictions or successful appeals in Tulia. Two outstanding
indictments have yet to be prosecuted: They are Tanya White, set for trial
on April 16, and Zuri Bossett, set for July 23. Both are represented by
Amarillo defense attorney Jeff Blackburn.